Such a holder is employed in a lot of equipment used in the manufacture of discrete and integrated semiconductor products. The invention thus also relates to an apparatus provided with such a holder.
A holder of the type mentioned in the opening paragraph is known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,246,218, published on Sep. 21, 1993. In said specification, a description is given of a holder for a substrate cassette, which comprises a base plate on which a guide member is secured, which guide member includes two separate, mutually parallel guides. The cassette holder can be alignably arranged between the guides whose upper side, adjoining the cassette, tapers downwards. As a result of this guide profile with aligning effect, it is easier to accurately arrange the cassette between the guides. After the cassette has been arranged between the guides, the substrates are removed from the cassette, treated and placed back by a robot which forms part of an apparatus comprising the holder. For this purpose, the holder is coupled to a lift mechanism. This enables the substrates to be placed in or removed from the cassette one by one and at the same height. After all substrates have been treated, the cassette is transferred to another apparatus comprising similar features for a subsequent treatment.
A drawback of the known holder resides in that the cassette is not always identically located, or identically aligned, in the holder. As a result, introducing the substrates into the cassette or removing them from the cassette is hampered, which may cause damage to the substrates. Also damage to the cassette or equipment is possible.